A Concise History of Kentucky

6 From Statehood to the Civil War

C H A P T E R S I X From Statehood to the Civil War Between Kentucky’s statehood in 1792 and the start of the Civil War in 1861, the commonwealth grew rapidly. On the surface, visitors found the state a good place to live. They noted the many inventions, the good college in Lexington, the strong business growth of Louisville, the rich farms of western Kentucky, and more. By the middle of that period, people visited the state and wrote of what they found. One man called Lexington “a lively handsome city. The streets are all lined with shade trees. There is much show and luxury here.” Another said that Louisville’s Main Street “presents a proud display of wealth. . . . The present inhabitants are the most hospitable in the Western States.” A third traveler referred to Bowling Green as “a thriving and handsome town” with a good future. He noted that “the very beautiful” city of Hopkinsville had a “society uncommonly friendly,” and he found Henderson ’s citizens “intelligent, frank, and hospitable.” One visitor wrote that in Kentucky, “every man stands on his own individual merits.” But that was not true. Behind the nice towns and the friendly people that these visitors described, there was another Kentucky that refused to let a large number of people in the state stand on their own merits and abilities—the enslaved. The visitors said little or nothing about the slaves, even though much of Kentucky’s wealth came from slave labor. Slaves’ lives were part of the hidden story of the state. Slavery Long before the English began to settle in Kentucky, slavery existed in America. During the trip from Africa across the ocean to the New World, many slaves died. Once the survivors arrived in North America, they had to adopt a new language and a new religion. They had to learn about new crops and new ways of doing things. They kept some of their old ways, however, such as singing African songs and retaining some African words, which are now part of the English language. The culture 92 • A Concise History of Kentucky that the slaves developed was not truly African, nor was it fully European , for each group changed the other. It was American. Slavery had been in America for more than 150 years when Kentucky was first settled. People from Virginia and other places brought slaves with them into the new area. Early explorer Christopher Gist had only his black slave with him when he traveled to Kentucky in the 1750s. Daniel Boone turned back after his first trip to settle the land, but slaves had been part of that group. On his next try, a slave and a white man died in an Indian attack. The two men were buried side by side; the survivors considered them equal in death, even if they did not treat them as equal in life. A slave later died defending Boonesborough. One out of ten people in early Fort Harrod was a slave. Blacks and whites fought together, and both shaped Kentucky. When Kentuckians met to write a constitution in 1792, they voted on whether to keep slavery or end it. They kept it by a vote of twenty-six to sixteen. Those twenty-six had seemingly forgotten that blacks and whites had fought as equals against their shared enemy. They did not consider that both groups had worked to build a state out of the wilderness . They could not throw off their old ways totally, even on this new frontier. So they planned for their freedom as a new state, but they excluded slaves from that freedom, and slavery continued. A visitor wrote: “The fertility of the lands generally vastly exceed any thing I ever saw before. But, O Alas! Here, as in Virginia, the slavery of the human race is unfortunately tolerated. Here the cries of the oppressed are heard.” Those cries would go on for a long time. At the time of statehood, about one-quarter of the white families in the new state owned at least one slave. The average number of slaves per family was 4.3. About a half century later, more families had slaves, and the average number had gone up to 5.4 slaves per family. One man in Henderson owned 214 human beings. Although well over half the white families in Kentucky did not own slaves, many of them still supported the slave system. Slavery was not about to...